Hitler, Ibsen, and Political Theater

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To what extent was the Nazi movement suffused with pure theater? What explains the fascina­tion that Nazi symbols and Adolf Hitler himself had for millions, then and even today? Classic theater in Europe, especially drama, has always been viewed as serious literature, and Germany to this day has more theaters than any other country in the world. During the National Socialist period the Nazi Party made great use of theatri­cal techni­ques to embellish Party events.

In Ibsen and Hitler, Steven F. Sage assesses the impact Henrik Ibsen’s plays had on the develop­ment of Adolf Hitler’s Welt­an­schauung and place in history.  Sage, who completed the book as a scholar at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, must be read with caution because he moves rapidly from Hitler’s appreciation of Ibsen’s plays, especially Emperor and Galilean, which is factual and convincing, to what the author considers the dictator’s slavish obsession and identification with the playwright’s other plots and characters, which is far less convincing. Always mindful that this book has been written to further traduce the National Socialist leaders of the period, nonetheless much of the material intro­duced is new to the American reader and well worth examining.

Ibsen and Hitler argues that there are much more than coincidental similarities between the characters and plot lines in Ibsen’s plays and the policies and speeches of Adolf Hitler. Indeed, textual analysis of passages from Hitler’s speeches and passages in the plays reveals parallels that could hardly be accidental. The three Ibsen plays upon which Sage bases his study are: Emperor and Galilean, The Master Builder, and An Enemy of the People. Emperor and Galilean tells the story of Julian the Apostate, a nephew of the Christian emperor Constantine the Great, and his foiled attempt to reinstate paganism in the Roman Empire. Ibsen considered Emperor and Galilean to be his magnum opus. It was first published in Norway in 1873 and was translated into German in 1899. Read more

The Neocon’s Defeat in Iraq: On to Iran

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The Obama Administration’s announcement of a complete troop withdrawal from Iraq is a stunning defeat for the neocons. The neocon plan was an indefinite military presence in Iraq on the model of the continuing American military bases in Japan and Germany after WWII. Obviously, Iran is a big winner, at least for now, with an ally in the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq.

Of great interest is whether Iraq will maintain the democratic institutions established by the Americans. In the long run, I suspect that from the viewpoint of the neocons, the operation certainly bought time — the time needed for Iraq to rebuild and once again pose a danger to Israeli interests. Read more

Jewish Double Standards and Hypocrisy Department: Reform Jews Get on the Far Right Bandwagon

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But remain staunchly on the left in the U.S.  Mondoweiss reports on a major conference of the Union for Reform Judaism:

But Natan Sharansky? Sharansky is a rightwing Israeli leader who chairs One Jerusalem, which has worked to kill the two-state solution, supposedly precious to liberal Jews. And Bill Kristol– WTF! Kristol is the neoconservative leader who pushed the Iraq war, writing that “Israel’s fight against terrorism is our fight.” Kristol has backed Israeli colonies through the West Bank.

This demonstrates the conservatism of even Reform Jews when it comes to Israel. Reform Jewish leader Eric Yoffie attacked Richard Goldstone months after the Gaza horror. Reform Jewish leader Rabbi David Saperstein criticized J Street for taking a fairly mild stand against settlements. And J Street has pulled back its criticisms of Israel because it has pitched its tent inside the Jewish community and the Jewish community is reactionary on the Israel question. So it follows that at a time when Israel is losing credibility around the world, Reform circles the wagons, and welcomes rightwingers.

So President Obama (another headliner guest at the conference) is sharing the floor far right Jewish ethnonationalists. Forgive me for being cynical when we hear the constant refrain that the reason that Jews are on the left is because of “Jewish values” of tolerance and social justice. This is just another example of a repeated theme here, that Jewish ethics is fundamentally about what is good for the Jews. The Jewish culture of the left in the U.S. is ethnic warfare against the traditional people and culture of America, while Jewish attitudes about Israel justify ethnic warfare against the Palestinians—including tolerance of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Jewish values as ethnic warfare.

The Usual Suspects Angered by Pat Buchanan’s Appearance on James Edward’s Radio Show

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Pat Buchanan, always a gentleman, refuses to back down when asked by NPR about his most recent appearance on The Political Cesspool Radio Program. (See also the current TOO featured video for the entire interview.) Note especially Pat’s unintimidated response to the interviewer’s point that ADL head Abe Foxman condemned the interview: “I think there’s an awful lot of smearing being done by the Anti-Defamation League frankly over the years of individuals who simply disagree with them maybe about U.S. policy toward Israel.” Exactly. As Joe Sobran famously said, these days anti-Semites are people that Jews don’t like.

In the meantime, the story of Pat’s latest interview with us is quickly becoming a top news story. Here is one example, from Huffington Post:

African American political advocacy group Color Of Change has called for MSNBC to fire longtime analyst (and even longer-time lightning rod) Pat Buchanan for what it called his “white supremacist ideology.”

The advocacy group sent petition letters to its members on Tuesday. The letter said that MSNBC gives Buchanan a platform to pass off his often loaded remarks as “legitimate mainstream political commentary.”

While Color of Change cited comments made by Buchanan from as early as March 2008, the advocacy group highlighted Buchanan’s new book “Suicide Of A Superpower” and a Saturday appearance on the controversial radio show “The Political Cesspool” (whose host has described his ideology as “pro-white”) as current reasons the network should fire Buchanan.

“Buchanan has just published a book which says that increasing racial diversity is a threat to this country and will mean the ‘End of White America.’ This weekend, to promote his book, he went on a white supremacist radio show…” read the “Fire Pat Buchanan” petition letter.

Buchanan also appeared on NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show” on Tuesday and further discussed his new book and radio show appearance on “Political Cesspool.”

He defended his decision to visit the radio show and asked “Am I supposed to go and vet all the people on these shows and get the list from [Anti-Defamation League chief] Abe Foxman on what shows I can go on to?”

Make no mistake, friends, in today’s political climate, false accusations such as “white supremacist,” “racist,” and “anti-Semite,” simply mean “unapologetic conservative white person.” These are just intimidating words that are employed to try and make folks like me, who liberals truly hate, go away. I wrote a book about this concept. Read more

Death on the Installment Plan

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The Dance of Death, 1474, fresco painting (Church of St. Mary, Beram, Croatia


(Translated from the French by Tom Sunic)

Ezra Pound, in his famous Canto XLV With Usura writes:

.. with usura
seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but it is made to sell and sell quickly
with usura, sin against nature,
Is thy bread ever more of stale rags
is thy bread dry as paper,
with no mountain wheat, no strong flour
with usura the line grows thick
with usura is no clear demarcation
and no man can find site for his dwelling.
Usura slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man’s courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
between the young bride and her bridegroom
 CONTRA NATURAM
They have brought whores for Eleusis
Corpses are set to banquet
at behest of usura.

The excesses of money lending were condemned in Rome, as was witnessed by Cato, who also wrote that if the thieves of sacred objects deserve double punishment, the usurers deserve quadruple punishment. Aristotle (Politics I, X) in his denouncement of the chrematistics, i.e. the obsession with money matters, seems to be even more radical.

There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural. Read more

Roosevelt’s Catos

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Winter in Germany, 1946-1947

Today we can hardly imagine that 65 years ago the victorious Allies were in the process of dismembering Germany, tearing down its economy and starving out its population. Older Germans remember the postwar winter of 1946/1947 as a dreadful hunger winter. In his book The German Question and the Origins of the Cold War (Milan 2008) Nicolas Lewkowicz notes that “Germany was given the most comprehensive treatment ever dispensed to a vanquished nation in the modern history of the international political system.” (p. 11) The question is how this treatment came to be and which forces played a pivotal role in these developments.

In 1942 the war was far from decided as German submarines were cruising the American Eastcoast and German tanks were relentlessly advancing in Russia and Africa. This did not stop (or maybe actually encouraged) Jewish exiles from dreaming about Germany’s demise after the war. Tens of thousands of Jewish exiles from Germany had found refuge in New York and even had their own newspaper —Aufbau (German word for ‘build-up’). They were not sitting idle awaiting the end of hostilities, but were active in canvassing the public opinion to lobby for imposing a hard peace on Germany. The most active and outspoken among them was Emil Cohn, better known under his German pen name Emil Ludwig. Read more

Neocons and the Incredible Jewish Ethnic Infrastructure

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Yet another glimpse into the massive Jewish ethnic infrastructure, the infrastructure that undergirds the power of the Israel Lobby. A column by Justin Logan in The National Interest (“Memo to Leslie Gelb: The neocons never left“) points out that neocons are alive and well, dominating the foreign policy of the Republican Party. Logan points to Mitt Romney’s foreign policy advisers, most of whom are neocon Jews. And we certainly can’t expect anything better from the likes of Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, and Herman Cain.

The reason the neocons have been so successful in taking over the Republican foreign policy establishment is that they provide careers for like-minded people:

As Scott McConnell has pointed out, neoconservatism is a career. Or as Bill Kristol remarked in 2005, the neoconservatives have done such an excellent job building institutions and infrastructure for developing the next generation of neocons that “soon there are going to be more neoconservative magazines than there are neoconservatives.” There are dozens of twenty-something, thirty-something, forty-something and older neocons throughout Washington, working at think tanks, editorial pages, in government and elsewhere. I could probably count on two hands the number of youngish national-security types I know in town who I could strain to call realists. This imbalance among foreign-policy elites helps create the mistaken impression that there are lots of neoconservatives in America generally, which there aren’t. Neoconservatism really is a head without a body.

But that’s how foreign policy (not to mention immigration policy and policy related to all things multicultural) is made in the US—by elites with money and political connections, not by popular sentiment. The interests of America be damned. Read more